The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people
#10951
Clifford Edmund Bosworth
#10962
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Clifford Edmund Bosworth FBA was an English historian and Orientalist, specialising in Arabic and Iranian studies. Life Bosworth was born on 29 December 1928 in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire . His father, Clifford Bosworth, clerked for Board of Guardians before working for Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. His mother was Gladys Constance Gregory. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in modern history from St John's College, Oxford, before achieving an MA in Middle Eastern studies and PhD degrees from the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#10952
Xenia de la Ossa
#10963
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Xenia de la Ossa Osegueda is a theoretical physicist whose research focuses on mathematical structures that arise in string theory. She is a professor at Oxford's Mathematical Institute. Academic career Xenia de la Ossa received her PhD from University of Texas at Austin with the dissertation Quantum Calabi-Yau Manifolds and Mirror Symmetry written under the supervision of Willy Fischler.
Go to Profile#10953
David Mazzucchelli
#10964
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
David John Mazzucchelli is an American comics artist and writer, known for his work on seminal superhero comic book storylines Daredevil: Born Again and Batman: Year One, as well as for graphic novels in other genres, such as Asterios Polyp and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel. He is also an instructor who teaches comic book storytelling at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
Go to Profile#10954
Lois Lowry
#10965
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Lois Ann Lowry is an American writer. She is the author of several books for children and young adults, including The Giver Quartet, Number the Stars, and Rabble Starkey. She is known for writing about difficult subject matters, dystopias, and complex themes in works for young audiences.
Go to Profile#10955
Gordon G. Chang
#10966
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Gordon Guthrie Chang is an American journalist, lawyer, political commentator, and writer. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of China in which he attempted to predict the collapse of China and claimed that it would collapse by 2011. In December 2011, he changed the timing of the year of the predicted collapse to 2012.
Go to Profile#10956
Pierre Goubert
#10967
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Pierre Goubert was a French historian. A member of the Annales School, he is considered one of the founders of historical demography and modern rural history. He was a noted specialist on the 17th century, especially of the Ancien Régime societies and mentalities.
Go to Profile#10957
Joe Staton
#10968
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Joe Staton is an American comics artist and writer. He co-created the Bronze Age Huntress , as well as the third Huntress , Kilowog and the Omega Men for DC Comics. He was the artist of the Dick Tracy comic strip from 2011 to October 2021.
Go to Profile#10958
Cathy O'Neil
#10969
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Catherine Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the author of the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction, and opinion columns in Bloomberg View. O'Neil was active in the Occupy movement.
Go to Profile#10959
Johannes Gehrke
#10970
Overall Influence
Johannes Gehrke is a German computer scientist and the director of Microsoft Research in Redmond and CTO and Head of Machine Learning for the Microsoft Teams Backend. He is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and the recipient of the 2011 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award. From 1999 to 2015, he was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where at the time of his leaving he was the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science.
Go to Profile#10960
Ray Bradbury
#10971
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Go to Profile#10961
Judith Simmer-Brown
#10972
Overall Influence
Judith Simmer-Brown is a Distinguished Professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies Emerita at Naropa University. She has expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, Women and Buddhism, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, Western Buddhism and Contemplative Education. She is an acharya — a senior Buddhist teacher — in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition and was a senior student of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She serves on the board of the Society of Buddhist-Christian Studies, and is on the steering committee of the Contemplative Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion. Previously she was a member of th...
Go to Profile#10962
Carol Rosenberg
#10973
Overall Influence
Carol Rosenberg is a senior journalist at The New York Times. Long a military-affairs reporter at the Miami Herald, from January 2002 into 2019 she reported on the operation of the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, at its naval base in Cuba. Her coverage of detention of captives at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp has been praised by her colleagues and legal scholars, and in 2010 she spoke about it by invitation at the National Press Club. Rosenberg had previously covered events in the Middle East. In 2011, she received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her nearly decade...
Go to Profile#10963
David Blanchflower
#10974
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
David Graham Blanchflower, , sometimes called Danny Blanchflower, is a British-American labour economist and academic. He is currently a tenured economics professor at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, part-time professor at the University of Glasgow and a Bloomberg TV contributing editor. He was an external member of the Bank of England's interest rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee from June 2006 to June 2009.
Go to Profile#10964
Raman Sundrum
#10975
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Raman Sundrum is an Indian-American theoretical particle physicist. He contributed to the field with a class of models called the Randall–Sundrum models, first published in 1999 with Lisa Randall. Sundrum is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and the director of Maryland Center for Fundamental Physics.
Go to Profile#10965
Douglas Moggach
#10976
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Douglas Moggach is a professor at the University of Ottawa and life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He is Honorary Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and has held visiting appointments at Sidney Sussex College and King's College, Cambridge, the Centre for History and Economics, Cambridge, Queen Mary University of London, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa., and the Fondazione San Carlo di Modena,where he taught a graduate seminar in Italian on German Idealism. Moggach has also held the University Research Chair in Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. In 2007, he won the Killam Research Fellowship awarded by the Canada Council for the arts.
Go to Profile#10966
Nancey Murphy
#10977
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the B.A. from Creighton University in 1973, the Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley in 1980, and the Th.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in 1987.
Go to Profile#10967
Birger Wernerfelt
#10978
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Birger Wernerfelt is a Danish economist and management theorist, and JC Penney Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is best known for “A Resource-based View of the Firm” , which is one of the most cited papers in the social sciences.
Go to Profile#10968
Andrea Romano
#10979
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Andrea Romano is an American former casting director, voice director, and voice actress whose work includes Batman: The Animated Series, Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Bonkers, Freakazoid!, Pinky and the Brain, Teen Titans, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, The Boondocks, Static Shock, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, Batman Beyond, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , SpongeBob SquarePants and multiple Warner Bros. Animation/DC Comics direct-to-video films including: Wonder Woman and Green Lantern: First Flight. Her voice acting, as of 2010, cons...
Go to Profile#10969
Peter Schmeichel
#10980
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Peter Bolesław Schmeichel is a Danish former professional footballer who played as a goalkeeper. During eight seasons at English club Manchester United, he captained the club to victory in the 1999 UEFA Champions League Final to complete the Treble. He also played with the Danish national team, with whom he won the UEFA Euro 1992.
Go to Profile#10970
Dick Advocaat
#10981
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Dirk Nicolaas Advocaat is a Dutch former football player and coach. Advocaat was successful as a football player and as a coach, including three stints with the Netherlands national team. He has coached a number of clubs in the Netherlands and abroad , as well as the national teams of a number of countries, including South Korea, Belgium and Russia. His nickname is "The Little General", a reference to his mentor Rinus Michels.
Go to Profile#10971
Henry Kučera
#10982
Overall Influence
1925 - 2010 (85 years)
Henry Kučera , born Jindřich Kučera , was a Czech-American linguist who pioneered corpus linguistics, linguistic software, a major contributor to the American Heritage Dictionary, and a pioneer in the development of spell checking computer software. He is remembered in particular as one of the initiators of the Brown Corpus.
Go to Profile#10972
Maurice Herlihy
#10983
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Maurice Peter Herlihy is a computer scientist active in the field of multiprocessor synchronization. Herlihy has contributed to areas including theoretical foundations of wait-free synchronization, linearizable data structures, applications of combinatorial topology to distributed computing, as well as hardware and software transactional memory. He is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1994.
Go to Profile#10973
Victor Papanek
#10984
Overall Influence
1923 - 1998 (75 years)
Victor Josef Papanek was an Austrian-born American designer and educator, who became a strong advocate of the socially and ecologically responsible design of products, tools, and community infrastructures. His book Design for the Real World, originally published in 1971 and translated into more than 24 languages, had lasting international impact.
Go to Profile#10974
Richard E. Wagner
#10985
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Richard Edward Wagner is an American economist. He is professor emeritus of economics at George Mason University. He works primarily in the fields of public finance, public choice, and complexity economics.
Go to Profile#10975
Russell Jacoby
#10986
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Russell Jacoby is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles , an author and a critic of academic culture. His fields of interest are twentieth-century European and American intellectual and cultural history, specifically the history of intellectuals and education.
Go to Profile#10976
Eleanor Duckworth
#10987
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Eleanor Ruth Duckworth is a teacher, teacher educator, and psychologist. Duckworth earned her Ph.D. at the Université de Genève in 1977. She grounds her work in Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder's insights into the nature and development of understanding and intelligence and in their clinical interview method. Duckworth also has been an elementary school teacher. Her participation in the 1960s curriculum development projects Elementary Science Study and African Primary Science Program was germinal for her insights and practices in exploratory methods in teaching and learning. She has conducted...
Go to Profile#10977
Neville Alexander
#10988
Overall Influence
1936 - 2012 (76 years)
Neville Edward Alexander OLS was a proponent of a multilingual South Africa and a former revolutionary who spent ten years on Robben Island as a fellow-prisoner of Nelson Mandela. Early life Alexander was born in Cradock, Eastern Cape, South Africa to David James Alexander, a carpenter, and Dimbiti Bisho Alexander, a schoolteacher. His maternal grandmother, Bisho Jarsa was an Ethiopian from ethnic Oromo, rescued from slavery by the British.
Go to Profile#10978
Charles Thomas Horngren
#10989
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Charles Thomas Horngren was an American accounting scholar and professor of accounting at Stanford University, known for his work in "pioneering modern-day management accounting." Biography Born in Milwaukee, Horngren joined the U.S. Army after high school graduation in 1946. Back in Milwaukee, he obtained his BA in accounting at the Marquette University in 1949. In 1952 he obtained his MBA from Harvard Business School, and in 1955 his PhD from University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#10979
Wayne McGregor
#10990
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Wayne McGregor, CBE is a British choreographer and director who has won multiple awards. He is the Artistic Director of Studio Wayne McGregor and Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet. McGregor was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire 2011 for Services to Dance.
Go to Profile#10980
Oliver Leaman
#10991
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Oliver Leaman is an American professor of philosophy and Zantker Professor of Judaic studies at the University of Kentucky, where he has been teaching since 2000. He specialized in the history of Islamic, Jewish, and Eastern philosophy. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1979.
Go to Profile#10981
Greg Moore
#10992
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Gregory W. Moore is an American theoretical physicist who specializes in mathematical physics and string theory. Moore is a professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department of Rutgers University and a member of the University's High Energy Theory group.
Go to Profile#10982
Bob Ezrin
#10993
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Robert Alan Ezrin is a Canadian music producer and keyboardist, best known for his work with Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss, Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Peter Gabriel, Andrea Bocelli and Phish. As of 2010, Ezrin's career in music had spanned four decades and his production work continued into the 21st century, with acts such as Deftones and Thirty Seconds to Mars. Ezrin is the winner of three Juno Awards. In 2011, he was awarded the Special Achievement Award at the 2011 SOCAN Awards held in Toronto. On 29 December 2022, Ezrin was named an Officer of the Order of Canada, the second-high...
Go to Profile#10983
Andrew B. Whinston
#10994
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Andrew B. Whinston is an American economist and computer scientist. He is the Hugh Roy Cullen Centennial Chair in Business Administration, Professor of Information Systems, Computer Science and Economics, and Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce in the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
Go to Profile#10984
David Prychitko
#10995
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
David L. Prychitko is an American economist of the Austrian School. Prychitko is a critic of Marxism, but defends the idea of workers' self-managed firms in a freed market system. Prychitko is a tenured professor at Northern Michigan University.
Go to Profile#10985
Nicolae Popescu
#10996
Overall Influence
1937 - 2010 (73 years)
Nicolae Popescu was a Romanian mathematician and professor at the University of Bucharest. He also held a research position at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy, and was elected corresponding Member of the Romanian Academy in 1997.
Go to Profile#10986
Jesús Padilla Gálvez
#10997
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jesús Padilla Gálvez is a philosopher who worked primarily in philosophy of language, logic, and the history of sciences. Professional biography Jesús Padilla Gálvez studied Philosophy, History and Mathematics at the University of Cologne and was awarded the M.A. in 1983 and a Dr. phil. in Philosophy in 1988. He was Research Assistant at the University of Murcia and later held the post of Associate Professor for Logic and Philosophy of Language at the University of León . From 1994 to 1999 he was Visiting Professor at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz . Since 1999 he has been Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo .
Go to Profile#10987
Ang Lee
#10998
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Ang Lee is a Taiwanese filmmaker. Born in Pingtung County of southern Taiwan, Lee was educated in Taiwan and later in the United States. As a filmmaker Lee's work is known for its emotional charge and exploration of repressed, hidden emotions. During his career, he has received international critical and popular acclaim and numerous accolades including two Academy Awards, four BAFTA Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2003, Lee was ranked 27th in The Guardian 40 best directors.
Go to Profile#10988
Wim Wenders
#10999
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Ernst Wilhelm "Wim" Wenders is a German filmmaker, playwright, author, and photographer. He is a major figure in New German Cinema. Among the honors he has received are prizes from the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. He has also received a BAFTA Award and been nominated for three Academy Awards and a Grammy Award.
Go to Profile#10989
Frank Quitely
#11000
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Vincent Patrick Deighan , better known by the pen name Frank Quitely, is a Scottish comic book artist. He is best known for his frequent collaborations with Grant Morrison on titles such as New X-Men, We3, All-Star Superman, and Batman and Robin, as well as his work with Mark Millar on The Authority and Jupiter's Legacy.
Go to Profile#10990
Marc Lynch
#11001
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Marc Lynch is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, where he is also director of both the Institute for Middle East Studies and the Middle East Studies Program.
Go to Profile#10991
Olivia de Havilland
#11002
Overall Influence
1916 - 2020 (104 years)
Dame Olivia Mary de Havilland was a British-American actress. The major works of her cinematic career spanned from 1935 to 1988. She appeared in 49 feature films and was one of the leading actresses of her time. At the time of her death in 2020 at age 104, she was the oldest living and earliest surviving Academy Award winner and was widely considered as being the last surviving major star from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Her younger sister was Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine.
Go to Profile#10992
David Crane
#11003
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Crane is an American writer and producer. He is best known as one of the co-creators of the television sitcoms Friends and Episodes. Early life Crane was born to a Jewish family in West New York, New Jersey, the son of Joan Crane and veteran Philadelphia television personality Gene Crane. He attended Harriton High School in Pennsylvania and graduated from there in 1975. He is a 1979 graduate of Brandeis University.
Go to Profile#10993
Jeffrey G. Williamson
#11004
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Jeffrey Gale Williamson is the Laird Bell Professor of Economics , Harvard University; an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin ; Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; and Research Fellow for the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He also served as the president of the Economic History Association. His research focus is and has been on comparative economic history and the history of the international economy and development. Economist Hilary Williamson Hoynes is his daughter.
Go to Profile#10994
William Nierenberg
#11005
Overall Influence
1919 - 2000 (81 years)
William Aaron Nierenberg was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986. He was a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984.
Go to Profile#10995
Jacqui Cole
#11006
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Manina Cole is the Head of the Molecular Engineering group in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Her research considers the design of functional materials for optoelectronic applications.
Go to Profile#10996
Viktor Ivannikov
#11007
Overall Influence
1940 - 2016 (76 years)
Viktor Petrovich Ivannikov was a Russian computer scientist, a member of Russian Academy of Sciences, the head of System Programming Chair for the Institute for System Programming, head of the Departments of system programming at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics, Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology.
Go to Profile#10997
Stuart Sutherland
#11008
Overall Influence
1927 - 1998 (71 years)
Stuart Sutherland was a British psychologist and writer. Education Sutherland was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, before going to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. He stayed at University of Oxford for his PhD which was awarded in 1957 for research supervised by John Zachary Young.
Go to Profile#10998
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh
#11009
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Rohit Jivanlal Parikh is an Indian-American mathematician, logician, and philosopher who has worked in many areas in traditional logic, including recursion theory and proof theory. He is a Distinguished Professor at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York .
Go to Profile#10999
Stanley Kurtz
#11010
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Stanley Kurtz is an American conservative commentator, author and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has taught at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is also a contributing editor to National Review.
Go to Profile#11000
Juliane House
#11011
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Juliane House is a German linguist and translation studies scholar. Biography House received a degree in English and Spanish Translation and International Law from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Later, she worked as a translator and researcher. She earned her BEd, MA and PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Go to Profile